Complaints process

We have two stages to our complaints process. If you want support at any time during this process you can contact the Housing Ombudsman Service.

Your complaint will be investigated by a Home Group colleague, who will look after you throughout your stage one complaint.

You should contact us with your complaint within 12 months of the event taking place.

You want to know the outcome of your complaint quickly. So, we aim to:

• Log and acknowledge receipt of your complaint within five working days after your complaint has been logged. Remember to take the postal service into account if you have written to us
• Send you a response letter addressing your complaint within ten working days

In complicated cases, this can take longer. If this is the case, we will give you an explanation and a timeframe for when you will receive the response. This will not exceed a further ten working days without good reason.

When something hasn’t gone right it’s important to say sorry, and we’ll always do this. We also learn from our mistakes so they don’t happen again. See our accountability framework.

You can also expect an explanation of what has gone wrong, why and how we plan to put things right.

We consider requests for discretionary compensation as part of the complaints handling process. See our complaints, compliments and comments policy. Awards for compensation will be offset against any outstanding arrears and/or debt. We will then pay the balance to you.

There may be occassions, such as in the event of personal injury or damage to personal belongings where it is not appropriate to make an offer of compensation. These instances would be referred to our insurance team for consideration and handled outside of the complaints process.

If you are unhappy, at any point, you can:

• Request your complaint is escalated to the next stage for review
• And/or you can contact the Housing Ombudsman Service. They may be unable to carry out an investigation at this time but they may be able to provide you with impartial advice

Taking your complaint to the second stage of the complaints process

You will need to do this within ten working days of us writing to you with your complaint response.

You can let us know you want to go to stage two by:

• Telling the person who is dealing with your complaint
• Calling, emailing us or joining a live chat. Here are all the ways you can contact us

Unfortunately, you can't take your complaint to stage two if:

• Your reasons are unrelated to the original complaint. If you have an unrelated issue about something that has gone wrong let us know by making a new complaint. That way we can properly investigate it.
• The complaint should not be looked into further because it would compromise legal proceedings
• It has become clear the complaint has previously fully exhausted the complaint process

Sometimes life gets in the way and you may miss the 10 working days deadline. If that happens, we will take exceptional circumstances into account.

During stage two a senior colleague will look at:

• The actions taken at stage one
• Any outstanding actions

It’s not a repeat of the full investigation. We check the actions and decisions taken at stage one were thorough, reasonable and fair.

We will confirm your complaint is being reviewed and give you timeframes, and let you know which senior colleague is looking after you.

We aim to:

• Acknowledge receipt of your complaint within five working days. Remember to take the postal service into account if you have written to us.
• Provide a response addressing your complaint within 20 working days of the complaint being acknowledged

In more complicated cases this can take longer to provide. If this is the case we will let you know when we receive it. This should not exceed a further 10 days without good reason.

This is the final stage of our complaints handling process.

You may feel unhappy with our 20 day final response. If that’s the case you can:

• Refer your complaint to the Housing Ombudsman Service. They look at complaints between customers and housing providers, like us. You can contact them anytime about your complaint. If you have been through both stages of our complaints process and you are still not happy, you can ask them to conduct a full investigation into your complaint. Contact the Housing Ombudsman Service.
• Ask a local councillor or Member of Parliament to consider the complaint for you.
• Refer it to the Local Government Ombudsman Service This is for complaints about our adult care services.
• First tier tribunals can resolve disputes between homeowners and ourselves. Find out more about First Tier Tribunals on the Government’s website. 
• Leasehold Advisory Service can also support homeowners.

• Our insurance team may handle reports about injuries or damage to property
• An appeal relating to the outcome of an insurance claim may be considered to see if there was a service failure not considered by the insurance claims process
• If you have a complaint about an event that took place longer than 12 months ago we wouldn’t normally consider it. If you feel there are exceptional circumstances, please get in touch to discuss it further
• We are here to help. But we may refuse to deal with a complaint or deal with it differently if you act unreasonably. Please see our acceptable behaviour policy
• A first time service request like a request for repair, or a complaint about anti-social behaviour. Of course, if you’re not happy with how we’ve dealt your repair or ASB report then please let us know by making a complaint
• Some policies and procedures have their own right to appeal. For example, if you aren’t happy with your level of priority when applying for a home you have the right to appeal outside our complaints process
• Issues that are in court or have already been heard by a court or a tribunal
• An attempt to reopen a previously concluded complaint or to have a complaint reconsidered where we have already given our final decision at stage two